Social technologies have the potential to play a major role in productivity for businesses. McKinsey reports these technologies can increase productivity by 25%.

Social for Business
From revolutions in Egypt and Syria to the war against corruption in India, social media has certainly played its role in the modern world. However, social media doesn’t just have the power to topple governments or wage war against human right violations, it also helps 72% of companies to achieve higher productivity, says a report published by McKinsey Global Institute.

According to McKinsey, “Today, more than 1.5 billion people around the globe have an account on a social networking site, and almost one in five online hours is spent on social networks— increasingly via mobile devices. By 2011, 72 percent of companies surveyed reported using social technologies in their businesses and 90 percent of those users reported that they are seeing benefits.”

It is no secret that all the leading brands in the world use social media to understand customer needs so that they can target those customers for their products. It works like magic. If John likes your product, he is expected to share it with Alice and Bob and everyone else in his social circle. Brands that are able to maintain quality and engagement in social media are able to leverage this social power to increase their sales, quality of customer services, and products by using feedback from various social media channels.

McKinsey Global Institute recently analyzed the value of social media technologies for modern businesses. The Institute concluded that companies could raise the interaction between their employees using social media technologies. The Institute believes that this raising of interaction can also raise productivity from 20 to 25 percent, if implemented in the right way. You can download the full report here.

McKinsey prepared the report in order to understand the potential economic impact of social media engagement. They divided usage into four different sectors i.e. packaged goods, advanced manufacturing, retail financial services, and professional services. What they found is shocking: improved communication and collaboration from social media could add $900 billion to $1.3 trillion, annually, in value to the economy.

So really, businesses can benefit from social technologies in more ways than one. We have already seen what social media can do to increase productivity at each level from production to marketing. Social media can also be used to derive customer insight, forecast and monitor trends in the market, and to distribute business processes. These steps benefit not just product development, but also operations and distributions, marketing and sales, and even customer service.

While there’s no shortage of media hype surrounding social media and how it’s changing the business landscape, the truth is, most people have no idea what all the web lingo means, let alone how to use it to monetize a business. And no matter how extraordinary social media technology becomes, you still need a real human brain behind the operation. Oftentimes its helpful to hire an internet marketing strategist to explain social technologies to you.